Born into a Catholic family in 1948, Robinson's childhood was dark but no worse than that of many of her contemporaries. Fathers did drink, work away from home and beat their wives.
Women were programmed to marry but had few rights and the volatility of Robinson's mother may well have had its roots in her helplessness. Even in the affluent '50s and '60s, many families were short of money and it was usually up to the wife to make ends meet, while her husband made sure he had his booze money.
Most of the book is a depressing litany of Robinson's complaints about the world in which she was brought up. Then there is her failed first marriage, although her second - to a former Catholic priest - seems happy.
She justifies his leaving the priesthood because, she claims, he was coerced into going into the seminary. The book has a number of weaknesses: much of it is disjointed, there is no clear timeline and the lack of surnames and place names makes it difficult to keep track of things.
Historical events are sometimes distorted - for example, she claims the conquest of Mount Everest marked our birth as a nation. There are also outright errors: Robinson claims 51 people died in the Tangiwai disaster, when it was 151. More careful checking of facts would have helped.
In the hands of a top rewrite editor, Where the Rainbow Fell Down could have been an interesting story of a survivor. Alas, this self-published effort is not.
Gillian Vine is a Dunedin writer.
